Parteds

Parteds refers to the family of partitioning tools built around the GNU Parted project, a collection of free software utilities for disk management. The term commonly denotes the core components: the parted command-line utility, the libparted library, and the suite of programs and front ends that use libparted for partition manipulation. Parteds are used on Linux and other Unix-like systems, and are sometimes integrated into disk installers and system recovery environments.

Parted provides functionality to create, delete, resize, move, copy, and label partitions; it supports both MBR (dos) and GPT partition tables; can manage basic partitions and extended partitions; can set flags such as boot to indicate bootable partitions; and can report detailed device geometry and partition information. It can also create and check filesystems, either directly through libparted or via the underlying filesystem tools; it supports unit specification and scriptable batch operations.

The project originated as an open-source effort to provide a portable, script-friendly partitioning toolkit and has been adopted by many Linux distributions’ installers and repair tools. It lends its capabilities to graphical front ends such as GNOME Disks and KDE Partition Manager.

Limitations and cautions: partitioning operations can destroy data; users should back up data and ensure the correct device and partition numbers. The tool is designed for offline or live media environments and is not typically used on running systems for risky resizing.